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Debris
after September 16, 1920 bombing on
Wall Street. World-Telegram photo.
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A
BYTE OUT OF HISTORY
Terror
on Wall Street
09/13/07
The
lunch rush was just beginning as a non-descript
man driving a cart pressed an old horse forward
on a mid-September day in 1920. He stopped
the animal and its heavy load in front of
the U.S. Assay Office, across from the J.
P. Morgan building in the heart of Wall Street.
The driver got down and quickly disappeared
into the crowd.
Within
minutes, the cart exploded into a hail of
metal fragmentsimmediately killing more
than 30 people and injuring some 300.
The carnage was horrific, and the death toll
kept rising as the day wore on and more victims
succumbed.
Who
was responsible? In the beginning it wasn't
obvious that the explosion was an intentional
act of terrorism. Crews cleaned the damage
up overnight, including physical evidence
that today would be crucial to identifying
the perpetrator. By the next morning Wall
Street was back in businessbroken windows
draped in canvass, workers in bandages, but
functioning none-the-less.
Conspiracy
theories abounded, but the New York Police
and Fire Departments, the Bureau of Investigation
(our predecessor), and the U.S. Secret Service
were on the job. Each avidly pursued leads.
The Bureau interviewed hundreds of people
who had been around the area before, during,
and after the attack, but developed little
information of value. The few recollections
of the driver and wagon were vague and virtually
useless. The NYPD was able to reconstruct
the bomb and its fuse mechanism, but there
was much debate about the nature of the explosive,
and all the potential components were commonly
available.
The
most promising lead had actually come prior
to the explosion. A letter carrier had
found four crudely spelled and printed flyers
in the area, from a group calling itself the
"American Anarchist Fighters" that
demanded the release of political prisoners.
The letters, discovered later, seemed similar
to ones used the previous year in two bombing
campaigns fomented by Italian Anarchists.
The Bureau worked diligently, investigating
up and down the East Coast, to trace the printing
of these flyers, without success.
Based
on bomb attacks over the previous decade,
the Bureau initially suspected followers of
the Italian Anarchist Luigi Galleani. But
the case couldn't be proved, and the anarchist
had fled the country. Over the next three
years, hot leads turned cold and promising
trails turned into dead ends. In the end,
the bombers were not identified. The best
evidence and analysis since that fateful day
of September 16, 1920, suggests that the Bureau's
initial thought was correctthat a small
group of Italian Anarchists were to blame.
But the mystery remains.
For
the young Bureau, the bombing became one of
our earliest terrorism casesand not
the last, unfortunately, to involve the city
of New York. As the decades passed, the threat
from terrorism would grow and change, with
different actors and causes coming and going
from the scene. As we approach our 100th anniversary
next July, we'll be telling more and more
of those stories on this website. Stay tuned.
The
book, Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the
Red Scare Terrorist Bombers by Charles
H. McCormick, University Press of America:
New York, 2005, and the FBI investigative
file on the case were used in the development
of this article.